Decorating for Christmas can bring great joy to some people. For others, however, it is at best a headache. Artificial Christmas trees have been developed to reduce many of the chores normally associated with natural Christmas trees, including both live and cut trees. Later, internally illuminated artificial Christmas trees were created to minimize the effort needed to display a decorated Christmas tree while also reducing the risks from fire hazards that are associated with many illuminated natural Christmas trees.
Both natural and artificial Christmas tress can be lighted with strings of incandescent lights. Integral lighting systems for artificial Christmas trees are also generally known in the art. Examples of artificial trees incorporating such lighting systems are described in Siegal, U.S. Pat. No. 3,465,139 (Sep. 2, 1969); Rosenast, U.S. Pat. No. 3,532,874 (Oct. 6, 1970); Cox et al., U.S. Pat. No. 3,564,233 (Feb. 16, 1971); Wall, U.S. Pat. No. 3,721,815 (Mar. 20, 1973); Foley, U.S. Pat. No. 4,060,722 (Nov. 29, 1977); Carrington, U.S. Pat. No. 4,068,118 (Jan. 10, 1978); Morgan, U.S. Pat. No. 4,777,571 (Oct. 11, 1988); Koch, U.S. Pat. No. 4,878,157 (Nov. 21, 1988); Pickering, U.S. Pat. No. 5,104,608 (Apr. 14, 1992); and Labranche, U.S. Pat. No. 5,226,709 (Jul. 13, 1993). These prior art systems generally suffer from one or more flaws. For example, several of these designs involve placement of illuminated clusters at the end of each branch. This approach fails to illuminate the entire tree evenly and creates a lighting display that appears remarkably different from the standard strings of Christmas lights. Most of these designs contain a single light source located in an inconvenient area of the tree and which, therefor, cannot be replaced easily. For some designs, replacement of the light source requires dismantling the entire tree. Also, if the single light source should fail, all the lights on the tree go out until the light source is replaced. The majority of the prior art systems listed above also attempt to create "twinkling" effects (thereby varying the "lighting characteristics" of the artificial tree) using rotating color wheels. In addition to being simplistic and repetitive, these effects appear extremely dissimilar to the standard types of incandescent Christmas lights typically used for tree decorations. Finally, some of these prior art systems require a large quantity of fiber optics, which makes the trees prohibitively expensive to build.